Western Digital is trying to redefine the term “RPM”

Last week, / r / datahorder’s fine radiators were again annoyed with Western Digital – this time, for misrepresenting the rotational speed of their WD Red Network attacked storage hard drives. (Although the linked post leads to things, members of the German-language forum Hardware Lux.x.day began investigating the issue more than a year ago.)

We are reminded of complaints before this controversy that Western Digital is not properly disclosing the use of shingled magnetic recording technology g in their NAS drives. But the new complaint is that Western Digital calls 7200 rpm drives “5400 rpm class” – and drives report their own firmware through the 5400 rpm smart interface.

Recently, Radiator / U / Amaroko came out to prove or disprove the findings of previous netizens. For each drive model, Amoroko placed a sample of that drive on an empty cardboard box, placed a Blue Yeti mic directly over it, then continued the drive. Spectral analysis of the audio Dio recorded using the Adobe Dion dish showed a baseline frequency of 120 Hz for two models of WD8TB “5400 rpm class” drives.

120 cycles / second multiplied by 60 seconds / minute comes to 7,200 cycles / minute. So in other words, these “5400 rpm class” drives were actually rotating at 7,200 rpa.

Who doesn’t want fast rotational speed?

At first blush, this sounds like a non-issue – who wouldn’t choose a drive with a fast spindle speed? Unfortunately, fast spindles don’t just mean potential lower latency – they come with a sharp increase in both noise production and power consumption.

That increase in noise and power is what many users took in the first place on Western Digital’s fake 5,400 rpm spindle speed trail – those users bought drives that they expected lower and slower, but they got more noise, heat and power. They consume more than expected.

Comparing the data sheet between the 5,400 rpm Seagate Barracuda and the “5400 rpm class” Western Digital Red, tested by audio Dio spectral analysis, actually spins at 7,200 rpm – we can see a clear difference in power consumption. The 8TB Red takes 8.8 W in Barracuda’s 5.3 W when activated, and 800 MW in Barracuda’s 250 MW when in standby mode. The difference here isn’t, for the most part, the brand – while they rotate at the same actual RPM, Western Digital and Seagate’s drives consume roughly the same power.

To be fair to Western Digital, you can’t really buy an 8TB NAS drive that spins at 5,400RPM – WD’s Red and Seagate’s Ironwolf entry level NAS lineup uses 7,200 rpm spindles. But to be fair to consumers, “RPM” has a very specific meaning, and not a footnote to explain what “0000 RPM Performance Class” means on the WD Red datasheet.

Western Digital’s response

When we arrived at Western Digital during the research of this story, a representative confirmed the findings of people from different platforms and Redditter – which means that “5400 rpm class” does not mean that the drive spins at 5,400 rpm.

For selected products, Western Digital has been publishing RPM speeds within “class” or “display class” for numerous years instead of highlighting specific spindle speeds. We also fine-tune the hard drive platform and related HDD characteristics to create different variations of such platforms to meet different market or application requirements. By doing so, we can take advantage of our economy standards and pass on those savings to our customers. As with every Western digital product, our product details, including power, acoustics and performance (data transfer rate), are checked to meet the specifications provided on the product’s data sheet and marketing collateral.

In our editorial opinion, this response, though polished, is not useful – and even that is not yet a vague “RPM class”. This data sheet reader will be the consumer More Confusion from marketing fluff, no less. And “typical consumers” who may not understand Western Digital may try to avoid information that can read hard drive data sheets in the first place.

If you excuse the omot tomative analogy, it won’t set us apart any more than the window sticker on the V6 sedan, which declares it a “four-cylinder class,” without the hint that it’s actually under the hood.

Image list by Brian Wong / Flickr